Friday, April 6, 2018

When the Happy Light Breaks

Sorry, friends. I'm back on the topic of depression and loneliness.

This is  probably because I'm sitting on home on a Friday morning in my pajamas eating chocolate and bemoaning another rejection letter. I might have even cried a bit yesterday. For like the duration of "a River Flows in You." But not like a ton.

Crying is okay though. It means that I'm not too depressed to care about anything. It means I can still hold onto that label of "moderate" depression, rather than graduating to "severe." My Boy told me that it's a good thing I don't have a job because he'd make me stay home and take a sick day ("mental health is health too!"). I'm pretty sure if I had a job, I wouldn't be so depressed though.

It's funny how depression works like that. Sometimes I don't know why I'm depressed. That can get pretty intense because I have no way of getting better. It feels more like a mental illness then because it seems irrational and something that I have no control over. It's pretty normal comparatively to feel depressed because I feel lonely or hopelessly jobless. It almost annoys me when people send me findings about hormonal shifts or weather patterns causing depression, because that implies that there's something I could do about it, and therefore it's not as serious.

You ever think about how weird it is how we treat people differently when we think they're the reason they're in a bad place? Like, if someone gets shot in the leg by a drive by shooter, we hold benefits and bring over casseroles, but if someone shoots his own leg, we just snicker and vow to keep our guns locked up when he's around. The injury still hurts the same amount and costs as much to fix, but it's hard to have compassion on someone who is careless or unwise. We value cleverness and attentiveness at the expense of compassion for a mistake.

It's like I deserve to have suicidal thoughts because I was stupid enough to move across the country without securing employment first. It's like I deserve to be lonely because I didn't invest in a happy light. And if I suffer dramatic mood shifts around certain times of the month, well, I wasn't smart enough to deposit hundred's of dollars worth of synthetic hormones into my body. I don't want to go to a doctor who gives me instructions on how to get better because then it's my fault if it doesn't work; because I'm not good enough and didn't try hard enough.

There's this nice little hugbox philosophy that nothing is my fault and everyone else should bend over backwards so I'm never uncomfortable. I don't want to sound like I'm pandering to that. I think I should put in effort to improve my mental health when I can. Just recognize that sometimes I can't. Please love me despite this.

These days I see homeless people sleeping in subway cars or along quiet alleyways. I still don't know how to take this. I wonder if they're there because of something they did or because of external factors they had no control over. I wonder if I were in a position to help them, how long it would take for them to fall back onto hard times. I wonder if they are capable of making better choices or if the world is just turned against them. I suppose the reason they're homeless is no more important than the reason I'm depressed though. We don't give up on fixing something just because it's liable to get broken again; we don't stop showering just because we know we'll get dirty again. If we did give up, we'd lose something valuable in the process.

A person's value is not in the choices they make.

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